he could have done that and he didn't. [applause] .. [applause] moderator: can you put that increase in the national debt just on barack obama and nancy pelosi allowed? christie can you repeat that?

moderator: can you put the increase on the national debt of barack obama and nancy pelosi alone? christie, -- heavens no. congressman king has been in congress for ten years and has not gotten the job done. i think the answer is really, it is important to create jobs in this country, and i am focused on doing that in this district. so, you know, i have of plan to make sure that i convinced landowners tough as their land from one generation to the next and incentive plan dollars to help young farmers distorted. you know, one of the most important things we can be doing right now which congress has not done is passing the farm bill katie thank you. that is your time. next question from -- [applause] our next question comes from dan greene, staff writer for the northwest i will review. your question will go to christie vilsack first. >> for 43 straight months the national unemployment rate has

been higher than 8%. i was unemployment rate in august rose the five and a half%. what areas of iowa's economy d.c. ripe for job growth? how do you plan to foster that growth to lower our unemployment and benefit our state? christie well, i talked a little bit about that in my introduction in terms of connection, innovation, and also education. i really see the opportunity to create layers of economic opportunity in the small panels and help recreate the middle-class and i have a plant -- i have seven or eight plans that i have been talking about around the district for the last year-and-a-half. one of them in particular i think i would like to speak to right now is making sure that we create another layer of the economy. we have done a great job and renewable fuel. now we need to create products and small businesses that employ 15, 30, 60 people that are doing

things like making soy beans. my husband is holding as with football. we can make anything in this room from corn and we need to create small businesses that rely and those products this around this community and continue to grow small businesses so we can make the case to our children that they can come back here and live. [applause] moderator: same question to you. would you do to promote job growth in iowa? steve: i look back to when i first served in the iowa senate and the unemployment rate was at just over 2%. i know what that looks like. i have gone to work, like a lot of other people, especially in northern and western iowa and advocated what was done during the crisis years of the 80's which is that we need value added agriculture. all new wealth comes from the land. i was att's from field in mind. what you understand about the global economy to menasha

economy, you can really understand the economy. we have done very well. one of the very people supporting renewal energies which added more dollars per acre. today the value of products, $24 billion. and i was elected to congress was 12 billion. ag was 60 billion then, now over 200. we created a tremendous amount of wealth that has been built within the value added ag component of this. let's keep it up and keep taxes low unpredictable and let's have less government regulations and less intrusion in our lives. [applause] moderator: 30 seconds to respond. christie: you know, we have not been able to get much done. my energy policy is making sure that we just create energy

positions, short term, long term, medium-term growth for energy, but i just want to make sure that everybody knows that i will be a consistent champion for wind and renewable fuels in this district and congressman king has not been. [applause] moderator: your response, congressman? steve: i happen to be the american wind energy champion designated by the american wind energy association. [applause] i am supported by the renewable fuel and it -- industry across the board so far as i know. we are the number one renewable energy producing congressional district and all of america, the western third of iowa. when you add the other counties to make this we will easily be the number one renewable energy producing district, and i have been part of that. i am proud of what has been accomplished by your investment.

let's keep it up. [applause] katie the next question comes from our panel. it comes from northwestern college. your question goes to congressman steve king first. >> according to this day datacenter of iowa latinos make up 5 percent of the state's population. the fourth district have latino populations of more than 10%. five other counties, including here, a population of more than 5%. congressman king, what is your plan to deal with illegal immigration while still making i a lot of warm and welcoming place for new immigrants? .. first of all, we need to remember that we are all god's children created in his image.

there has to be dignity provided for all human beings, but the united states of america like any other nation, if we're going to be a nation, we have to have a border. if you don't protect the border and decided comes and goes, you're not a nation of all. at the center of this is the rule of law. the rule of law is one of the essential pillars of american exceptional as an. i stood clearly on that issue. most of the laws that we need out there, and i would add one more to it. it is called a new idea act is, and it is the new. the acronym stands for a illegal deductions act. breezy iras into the enforcement. a piece of legislation i have up there for a couple of cycles and it gives the employer safe harbor if they use e-verify but otherwise the irs would be able to be there to audit and it could take yards and dollar an hour and turn them into a $16 our employee which opens the door for iowans and hopefully i can finish in their robotic

[applause] christie: what is your plan to deal with illegal immigration while still making iowa a warm and welcoming place for new immigrants? christie: well, first of all, we need to make sure we secure our borders and make sure that we don't have people coming across to my guns or drugs from their cross illegally. we need to make sure lawful citizens did first chance at jobs. but we also need to make sure that people have a path with the citizenship. it is very important that if someone is willing to die for their country, willing to work are in school that they have an opportunity to become a citizen of this country. we are taught to love our neighbors as ourselves, and i know because i have talked to a lot of people in this area how important the emigrants are to making sure that we continue to have a thriving economic community here. people in this county have told

me how important the immigrants are to them, and they have told me also that they have talked to congressman king to ask him to tone down his rhetoric. when he speaks on national television if he is often embarrassing i/o when he talks about immigrants if they are stray cats or dogs. at the ready to make sure we do everything that we can to welcome people here because they are very very important part of our economy. [applause] >> how do you respond? .. there is not very much to speak to there. remind us all that it is important we shut off the bleeding at the border, shut off the jobs magnet, preserve and protect the rule of law and if you set up the pathway to citizenship for people who have come into this country or are

illegally in this country, you are rewarding lawbreakers. when you do that you get more lawbreakers. we can't be a country with an error rule of law, and that is the essential core year in the subject matter. i will preserve it. [applause] moderator: strong words. how do you respond? christie: people are willing to die for the country they should have an opportunity. when people break the law they go to the end of the line, pay a fine. but i don't think that we -- i think it is very, very important that we make sure we make people feel welcome here because there is economic opportunity for them. frankly, the people in this district that told me, farmers and people who are processing eggs and rocks and the dairy farmers need these people, respect the immigrants to work for them, want to make them feel

welcome. moderator: that is your time. thank you. [applause] i'm going to exercise my right as a moderator to as a follow-up at this point. what i would like to ask is, what do we do about those undocumented immigrants, those who have grown up in the state or any midwest who have been educated in our schools and to have assimilated very positively into the state? you answer first, christie vilsack. thirty seconds. christie: sure. when congress does not do its job another branch of government steps in, and that is what the president did when he offered opportunity to young people who were born in this country who, through no fault of their own, came here. i think that they need a pass to citizenship, and we need comprehensive immigration in this country, and congressman king has had the opportunity to do that in his last ten years in congress and has not. i am willing to get into a room

and find a compromise. i am the kind of person he can do that, and i think i am willing to make the step decisions when i go washington take to congressman king, i want to get you very quickly -- [applause] if those people that i talked about, those undocumented immigrants, are here, should they stay here? steve: one of the things that occurred in my year was the words when congress does not do its job. that is barack obama's statement he defies the constitution and does what he sees fit. we cannot have that. that is the rule of law that i talked about in my opening component of this aberration discussion. but what to do with people whose roots go deep here, some of whom were not aware there were breaking the law when it came here, that question is for after we restore the rule of law. we cannot lead with that. if we do, we will never restore the rule of law katie thank you, congressman. [applause]

when we come back focusing on the farm bill, plus head to the audience to take questions from northwestern college students, student loan at the top of their mind. you're watching the fourth district congressional debate on the station. we'll be right back. ♪ [applause] ♪ moderator: and welcome back, everyone, to the fourth district congressional debate on the northwestern college campus. we thought it only fair since we are here at the college to take questions from northwestern college students themselves. a junior here at northwestern will be reading a question from another student who submitted the question but could not be with us today. what is your question? >> i would like to ask a question about student loans and the fact that some many kids are having trouble getting them and that some many of them are defaulting on them.

what can you do about that? moderator: a good question. first answer, congressman steve king. steve: thank you. thank you for asking. the number one question i year while on college campuses. what are we going to do about student loans? had we make sure there is enough money to be borrowed. one of my answers is, -- first also student debt, graduating from college with a 24-$40,000 debt the you're carrying with you. first, ask you to remember your share of the national debt is 52,002 under and $88 today. that is something we all have to carry, and when you add this to in debt to debt it is to be quite high. the best thing you can do, and i challenge you because we are in this together is to do a good job of shopping for the best return on your tuition / grant dollar which is the best thing that can happen to keep tuition rates low. also, the federal government has taken over all the student loans, so they have essentially a monopoly on the student loan program. i would try to keep that into

the private sector so there can be competition. right now the taxpayers are subsidizing the interest on student loans, and that is something that will get more difficult to do as we get deeper into this national debt. moderator: thank you, congressman. the same question goes to you. how you handle the student loan debt crisis? christie: part of my education plan is to make sure we find telegrams. i spoke with leaders are now in college to talk about how hard it would be for them to go back to the farm or to start an agribusiness if they could not get pell grants because then they're would have to go access and very, very concerned about that. i am in favor of making sure we take care of pell grants and that we also have low interest loans and that students can pay with the kind of jobs the get after college. if, for instance, they go directly to wall street making $100,000 a year they need to pay them back center.

if, like me, you become a teacher or public servant you should be a will to pay them back at a lower rate. i am very much in favor of doing but never weekend to make short everybody has access to college. but congressman king voted for the ryan bill twice, and that would have cut billions of dollars out of the education program. so i think that is a real problem for him. moderator: congressman king, is that a problem for you? 302nd rebuttal. [applause] steve: you heard a partially informed response. it is a projection on what pell grants would do to increase over the years, and the ryan budget does that down to make sure there there for all students going into the future. it does not get them. and we want them to be solvent. that is a clear basis of the facts of it. i have supported them along the way. there have been a couple of times they have been dropped into a much larger bill. we should remember that much of this gets mischaracterized but

that is the fact, and we want to help all students. enrollment is going up, and that is a good thing. moderator: thank you, congressman. 30-seconds to respond. christie: he voted for the ryan budget twice, and it not only cut money for a college team of college students and makes it more difficult to get as patient, but he cut the legs out from under k-12 education as well and head start. so as an educator of 36 years, this is of concern to me. i will be a champion for education. my education plan also calls for money from rich to the top -- raced to the top to go to funding teacher education programs in small colleges like this one that would help college students actually learn what it is to teach in small towns, and am really proud of that as well katie thank you. [applause] we have another question from the student body. this is northwestern jr. what is your question?

>> as a huge supporter of the second amendment i am curious what your position on gun control is especially in light of the many shootings that have occurred since the horror, colorado tragedy. two is responsible and what can be done to ensure a safer america with fewer murders? moderator: the question is answered first tonight by christie vilsack. christie: i believe in the second amendment. i come from a family where hunting is very, very important, and i think it is part of our culture to pass down those traditions from one generation to the next. i also think i am the kind of person who would be good in congress to deal with this issue because i am not so sure that we necessarily -- that everybody needs to have access to an assault weapon are should be able to go online to access any kind of ammunition that they want. i think i am just the kind of person, somebody comes from the culture of second amendment rights and someone who understands that people have the right to collect and own and use guns but also someone who

realizes the potential for harm and is willing to get into a room and talk about these issues at back. moderator: congressman, what can we do test of the murders? ♪ i'm sorry? moderator: what do you do to stop these murders? ♪ you also are and say who is responsible for shootings and killings. and that is the person that pulls the trigger is responsible, not the gun. [applause] and with regard to the second amendment we should remember that the second amendment is there as a constitutional guarantee. we hunt, target shooting, do self-defense. those three things are second amendment guarantees are not the reasons why we have the second amendment. they are the benefits we get from the second amendment. the reason we have a second

amendment is to guard against tyranny because our founding fathers understood -- [applause] founding fathers understood that if he did not have an armed populist a tyrant could take over america, so we have a responsibility not just to defend the second amendment in words, but do so, indeed, by hunting and target practicing and also self-defense, but do so in a responsible, educated, gun safety weight. put it in our culture and let's have safety in their rejection of all violence in this country. [applause] moderator: thank you very much. i want to remind the crowd that as the answer if you applied during their answer they may stop which costs them time. keep that in mind if you applauded during their answer. thank you very much. 30-seconds for a bottle. christie: i talked to a lot of people involved in law enforcement, and many of them have said this is just as much a

people issue as it is a gun issue. i think if we invest in making sure that people have access to the mental health services and that we start working with children very young and making sure they grow up in communities , the kinds of communities that many of us grew up in where people care about you and take care of you but provide resources when people are in trouble then maybe we won't have so many of these shootings in the future. concentrate on the people part of it. moderator: thank-you, christie vilsack. [applause] congressman, 30 seconds to respond. ♪ again, our life has been -- i will do it this way. for my 60th birthday we were in our kitchen. our three sons were there. my youngest reached behind the refrigerator and brought out from behind their my father's 870 remington when master that was brand new in 1951 when he carried me at age two out into the duck blind.

a deep tradition and our family. we pass our guns down from generation to generation, teach and safety at an early age and exercise our second amendment rights and we will defend them by exercising them in as safeway. thank you. moderator: thank you, congressman. moving on to our next question from our panel of experts. , -- tom overly. your question goes to congressman steve king first. >> we learned that the u.s. house we will wait until after the november election to take up the proposed five-year farm bill. the current bill expires at the end f this month. what does the new farm bill have to include to benefit islands in the fourth congressional district? steve: the most important component of the new farm bill is a good risk management plan. that most important component of that is crop insurance. in the senate passed a farm bill out of their committee i said my job is to keep the corn belt harness. i have held on that.

i said in a seniority position on the ag committee, but staff people on early, reached out to start marking up this bill and putting language into it over a year ago, and we put extra people on in order to get this done. good risk management is the most important thing. at least 78 percent of the bill goes to nutrition. that is the food stamp side of this. agriculture is carrying 90 some percent of the political load while they volunteered to give up direct payments while the nutrition people are carrying some little bit of the political road, this is getting to be too much of a burden. we should remember, our producers are competitive, don't ask for much, need a good risk manage the plant. we need to protect funding and make sure they can make long-term plans so that as they buy land and make investments they can get a return with full knowledge of what will happen katie thank you, congressman. christie vilsack. what does the new farm bill have to --

christie: i have one question for congressman king. where is the farm bill? this is the most important legislation to people in rural iowa and rural america. we depended to have a road map. on the 30th of september when it expires farmers will have a hard time going to the bank to get credit for next year. young farmers will lose their opportunities in the young farmer program. dairy farmers are facing bankruptcy in many cases. and so congressman king had the opportunity to find -- sign a petition with all the other members of our delegation in iowa, and he is the only person who refused to do so. we do not have a farm bill and we will have one effective september 30th, and this is something that he has to be held responsible for. the only person in our delegation who would not sign the petition to bring a farm bill to a vote. i think there are 136,000 reasons why he did not do that, and those are the dollars that he is receiving from club for

growth because they're looking over his shoulder. [applause] moderator: congressman king, 30 seconds to respond. >> the usda has been spending millions of dollars advertising. they have gone from 19 million people on food stamps a few years ago to 47 million today. the bigger part of the argument going on in congress, and that is hurting our agriculture. but this last farm bill was extended six times before it was finally done. this one will come up, and i have a full commitment from the speaker of the house. when we go back in lame-duck. so i am sitting in a position where i expect to be on the conference committee and we will have a voice there when we hammer the last bill out. moderator: 30 seconds for your rebuttal c-span.org if you have an opportunity to speak to the speaker then he should have been able to bring the bill to the

floor right now i don't think you are going to be on a conference committee. you have not shown in other situations , and i don't think you will hear. so i think you should just pound on the speaker's door, and since this bill be passed and signed it with everybody else and you did not. you have to take responsibility for that. so i would like to know where the farm bill is. [applause] moderator: thank-you, christie vilsack. let's keep things moving, if we can. our candid it's face questions from facebook. but to your friends want to know? you are watching the fourth district congressional debate. ♪ moderator: welcome back, everyone, to the fourth district congressional debate live from the northwestern college campus. for a couple of weeks we have been asking viewers and readers to submit questions on facebook.

we got a lot, so many we could not get them into the hour-long debate. one question that is on the minds of many revolves around the patient protection and affordable care act, the president's health care reform plan. leslie thompson as this. both candidates have said they want to de-fund or eliminate portions of the patient protection and affordable care act. what are their plans to fix the system? you both have different views on this subject. congressman king, and specifically as you can tell us what you would replace it with and why. the question to you is, christie vilsack, why should the a see a stay on the books? you are the first to answer this question. christie: well, there are a lot of good things about the affordable care act. certainly being able to keep our children on our health insurance policies is one of them. making sure that people preexisting conditions have access is really important as well. but i think the most important

thing we need to deal with is as we go forward to make sure that we take care of cost. and one of the things we know, and you can go online to lick my whole program for health care reform, but one of the most important things is that we move to a system that is a coordinated care system. pays for results and not for services. i have talked to a lot of people about this issue, and people in iowa said that the marketplace is already driving as in this direction. if you go to fort dodge you can actually see this working where they're trying to make sure that they're paying for results and not for services. at think that is the place to begin. [applause] moderator: congressman king, what would you replace the patient protection and affordable care act with? what is your plan? steve: i want to make sure we address this in the forms of it first must be 100 percent repealed before there is anything yet to replace.

that is job one. [applause] then -- then, and i have been clear on that, i don't want to see republicans write a big health care reform or health insurance reform bill behind closed doors and roll it out and try to convince the american people that we have now come up with all the solutions behind those closed doors like nancy pelosi tried to do. we need to bring our solutions one the time, debate and before the public got in the open. first you when the debate, then the boat. single issue out the time, and navistar with this. i would sell insurance across state lines so i am and in kentucky is paying $1,000 per year and a young man in new jersey can buy the kentucky policy. then i would take a lot of money out of the pockets of the trial lawyers that are chasing ambulances. that has got to stop. $208 billion a year. i hope i can get back on the balance of this. ..

i was there as i said i would be for recent advance. but to follow up on that, we need full accountability for everybody's health insurance premiums, and we need to allow for the pre-existing conditions in this way and that's high risk

pools like we have in the state of iowa which i chair and the committee there are many components we cannot suffer the relationship between the doctors and patients, and we must allow investment to come in to be paid for the services that they provide. the government is not in a sition to do that. [applause] >> moderator: we have this question about bye partisanship. it would be necessary for republicans and democrats to work together for effective legislative process even if one party would gain control of both the house and the senate. how would you work to build consensus and the bipartisanship support for bills that you feel would benefit the fourth district? congressman, you're the first answer. king: i would start reworking a bipartisan fashion in the iowa delegation on a continual basis. in 2008 when the floods hit in iowa city i went over there immediately and flew over all

that and went on the ground and met with the leaders of cedar rapids for example for the democrats that represent that part of the state. they didn't take me about but rejoined me together and everything. when we get hit with floods on the side of the state become over and join me. i introduced legislation to protect us from the next flood coming down the missouri river with the sign on right away. that is the bipartisanship the you get in a national disaster. they are less partisan and congress but we have had a broad bipartisan effort here with an iowa working with those things that matter to iowa and hopefully i will be able to get a bipartisan support on the farm bill like a forgotten by partisans of along the missouri river legislation. h.r. 2942 in case you want to google that. >> moderator: mrs. vilsack how did you cut through the partisanship and build consensus in congress? vilsack: i was with amy klobuchar yesterday and she is

someone that i admire. she always works to fight a co-sponsor for a bill, and i would like to emulate that. i also frankly like to work really hard to make sure that i provide the kind of constituency services that chuck grassley provides to the people of the state, and i would like to go talk to him and his staff about how they do that. congressman king doesn't work in a bipartisan manner not with people in congress and not even with people in the delegation to the defeated, he would have gone and signed the petition for the farm bill. he instead brought to the floor 43 repeals for the act when he could have been working in a bipartisan fashion and he just wasn't capable of doing it. [applause] [applause] >> , the plan to be bipartisan mrs. vilsack doesn't believe it is the case. how do you respond? king: i wrote the repeal bill to repeal obamacare. [applause]

[cheering] and it was bipartisan when we voted on it and passed it in the house and it went over into the senate and i will say every republican in the house and the senate voted for my repeal bill. we needed to get that done and then we could have a bipartisan solution going forward. i'm working on this missouri river bill and i would like to know where she stands on that and also where the secretary of agriculture stands on that bill. >> thank you you, congressman. mrs. vilsack you have 30 seconds to respond. vilsack: congressman king you are running against me, not my husband. [applause] we need a farm bill, and requires bipartisan support. the senate was able to do that in three days. they created a bipartisan farm bill, and the house did not pass it, and as a result, at the end of this year when the sequestration comes, i believe what is going to happen is congressman king and his colleagues, his republican colleagues are going to go in and not only take money from

snap but really important money from crop insurance and conservation as well. >> moderator: thank you mrs. vilsack. [applause] back to the panel questions now. questions from the panel. damage from the northwest iowa review come your question for kristi vilsack first. >> mrs. vilsack for many voters in the district your stance on social issues will determine how they cast their ballot. clearly state and explain your views on same-sex marriage and a woman's right to have an abortion. vilsack: absolutely. first of all, i believe that it's really important -- i know this is particularly hard for my generation when we are talking about same-sex marriage but i think that if two people love each of the day should be able to marry, and i would hope that anybody that is it going to commit to another person would be able to have the same relationship that i have had with my husband for the last 39 years and the same privileges, the same legal privileges as well. in terms of a woman's right to choose, i think this is a really

hard decision. i am pro-choice. i think that abortion should be safe, legal and rare and we should be spending a lot of our time talking about prevention, talking about how we help young people get access to jobs and access to education and make sure that we make contraceptives affordable and available to people so that they can get started in those jobs, and i would recommend to him and congressman king on his views on contraception which is so very important. >> moderator: back to congressmen because the -- mrs. vilsack, thank you. [applause] , king if you could talk about your views on same-sex marriage and the abortion issue. king: my views are very and unlike the president and the

opponent i know when everyone's life began, at the moment of conception. [applause] and human life is sacred and all of its forms. we have to get down to the bottom. the president to be hasn't sought that deeply enough to answer that simple question it begins the moment of conception and ends at the natural death. that's where i stand on the abortion issue. it is this. the best way to raise a family is a mom and dad joining together in holy matrimony and raising our children and giving the best we have three that personable marriage to richland. i felt right that language and i defend that language in the defensive marriage act as a federal law. the president has decided he won't defend its and the

american people decide to change their mind i will abide that decision not by a justice decision to impose it upon us. [applause] to vignette vilsack: i've been working the last five years on an initiative that would try to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies among adult women and as of this morning it was announced that as a result of the work the initiative as done for the last year's the last five years we've been able to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and the number of abortions in the state. and so i would welcome the opportunity to sit down with anybody in this room when i have the last five years to make sure that we talk about prevention and that we talk about making contraception available to people. >> moderator: thank you. congressman king, 30 seconds to

respond. king: there's a piece of legislation i would support in congress called the prenda act. increasingly in this country they are following the model in asia where the old rules are being aborted simply because they are little girls. we brought legislation to block that and the van that. christie vilsack says it's ridiculous. i do care and it matters to those little or girls that were aborted because they were not a boy. [applause] >> moderator: when we return more questions from the panel, including what you think it's this of ackley qualifies mr. king and christie vilsack in congress. you are watching the debate on currency broadcasting. [applause] >> moderator: welcome back to

the fourth district congressional debate in orange city iowa. just a few minutes left for the candidates to continue to ask questions. we have a twitter question to mrs. vilsack but i'm going to do my best to make it a question to congressman king as well. this comes from ron. you say you support young farmers, would you support a complete repeal of the death tax and i would also like congressman king to weigh in as well. congressman king, you are actually the first one to answer this question. king: the death tax in my view as i long said the cigarette tax on the american dream. when people come to this country, they see the statue of liberty and they know that it's the first generation to be a struggle for them, they want to open the door for the next generation and the next generation. when my great-grandfather came here he had nine children, they brought - sections of land and he wanted all nine children to live on the 160 acres as a family farm and each generation

then to grow from there. it didn't work out for him because the stock market crash and 29 but that is the american dream. if you spend a lifetime or maybe even two or three generations building a unit, a unit that may be as a feed lot and a pastor and land in home places and the irs comes in in the death tax and says i've got to have 55% or 35% of the and you have to sell that off it destroys the unit. it's not the sum of the total was worth more than the sum of the parts. it's a direct attack on the american dream and i am for abolishing the tax. [applause] >> moderator: mrs. vilsack we are running short on time and went to get all the questions in. what would you do with the death tax? vilsack: one of the things we need to do before the end of this year is make sure that we raise the deduction on the estate tax so that we can save family farms. if at the end of this year we are at rest of that deduction going down to $1 million, it should be at least $5 million

because of the price of land where we have the richest farmland in the world, we probably need to raise that a little bit. but while we are talking about taxes but talked about congressman king's fair tax if you make over to under $50,000 a year. he is suggesting that we do with the federal income tax and what we substitute the tax that would make your grocery bill, without bond 23% to everything you buy at the grocery store for prescription drugs, the card you want to buy or the car seat you to bring your baby home from the hospital in. there is nothing about this that is fair to the middle class. we need to make sure that we don't have the fair tax as he calls it that we don't put this burden. >> moderator: that is your time mrs. vilsack. we will have a rebuttal so we make sure you both have the opportunity to get the last word in a closing statement. each candidate gets 90 seconds. we are running short on time. i will happen in the same order as the opening statements.

mrs. vilsack, 90 seconds for your closing statement. vilsack: sure. thank you very much for having me here tonight. you all know who i am. i've been at your public libraries, i've been in your schools, you may not know where some of my interest rates come from. when ibis 59 found out that my mother had breast cancer and she died before i graduated from high school, and was then i learned what it meant to be part of the community. we created support around me and few weeks ago i was driving up this way and few women were drinking coffee and they invited me to sit with them and they talked about the fact that one of their sons was coming back with his wife and their grandchildren to live and mallard and 22 people showed up on their doorstep when they moved in that day. but there is the worst day of your life for the best day of your life, the sense of community is really important and we know how in small towns

to get along and party doesn't matter on the best they were the worst day of your life site and temperament is an issue and in this election i think the kind of people that we need in the congress right now or not people but are so resolute that they will not match the decision but people that have the temperament to get into a room and a compromise and get along and come up with solutions to problems. i want to be a problem solver, not a fighter. if you don't remember anything else about me, please remember that. a man i met at the greene county fair said to me, you know, i'm not a democrat or republican. i'm an american. i wish congress would start acting like they are americans, to match. i'm ready to go to congress. >> moderator: thank. that is your time. [applause] give us your last word, 90 seconds. king: mrs. vilsack, there is a lot she doesn't know about the fair tax and i think that is already clear tonight. we were going to debate that saturday night in ames but she wasn't able to make that so if i were her i wouldn't have brought the subject appear tonight. first voted she is elected would

be for nancy pelosi, a vote for christie vilsack is a vote for nancy pelosi. you know what i stand for, you know about my life and when i believe in. i said that i would vote on all 286 towns and i did. i said i will call to all 380 tons in the district and i have. and we will be back. and we will continue to stay here with my family, no matter what happens in this election to read our roots go deep. i met people for over 1440 consecutive weeks. i created jobs, i signed the front of the paycheck, not the back. my wife has taught to generations of kindergartners. our family is rooted in this soil to the as i said, we are for generations living here and there are other generations that have been buried here. and i have lived all together in boonen vista county and have moved up to hancock county and down to crawford county and issac county. that is all in the fourth district. i didn't have to move here. i live here and i am not going anywhere afterwards. look at my record.

the people who know me best are the ones that support me this august. two-thirds of you in the last election. anybody that says otherwise is an insult to the people that those votes of on the board. let's move this country ahead to the next level of the destiny and do it together. >> thank you, congressman. [applause] we have unfortunately been out of tonight and the congressional debate. we want to speak for the guest tom king and christie vilsack for taking part and the station at quincy broadcasting, kwwl in waterloo and kttv in sioux city. >> northwestern college for providing this venue and northwest iowa review newspaper. >> we also want to speak for you, the voter for watching and sending great questions for tonight's debate. on behalf of the panelists at the review and from northwestern college i am from kttv.

thanks for watching. remember to vote november 6.

at next a discussion on the use of social media to market the use and sale of counterfeit drugs. this was part of an all-day conference hosted by the partnership for safe medicine. this is about 20 minutes. [applause] i will have to lower the microphone wherever i go. so, first i want to speak for the professor for the wonderful introduction obviously, and i'd like to disclose to the students i'm still working on my studies and hence the support of the psm is important for me to pursue this research and also to feed

my nine month old son and to keep my family happy. so, i want to really think psm for their support and a fellowship. today we are going to be talking to cut social media with online pharmacies. and my first one to open up for a quick question. i want to see how many of you here, you can raise your hand, facebook users. how many of you have added facebook in the last two or three years? also a lot of your early adopters. okay as you can see facebook and other types of social media are becoming interested in our lives and how we kind of function as a society. so, i first want to talk about the internet and how we change the overall views and impact. 2 billion people currently use the internet worldwide, and according to the surveys at least in the u.s. 51% of people are looking for health information online, so that indicates that a lot of people

are using the internet as a health information portal and for health behavior. but within the subset, and we actually have 965 million people using facebook alone. let's put that into context. if it were a country would be the third largest country just behind in the gut and china. so obviously it is becoming a more and more important part of our lives. we understand that, you know, facebook was part of the arab spring, order was part of the arab spring. we are talking about the diplomacy, 21st century statecraft, which involves diplomats using social media, so it is becoming more and more important in our lives today. but what i am going to be talking about today specifically are the risks associated with the social media format, and unfortunately we aren't talking about the use of social media by illicit online pharmacies. you know, the majority of you here are using facebook command a lot of internet pharmacies are also using facebook now to market their products and there are certain particular risks

associated with the pharmaceutical marking. they've had problems regulating this case coming and you can understand that because there is so much diversity in the social media platform so facebook is different from twitter, and twitter is different from myspace, so these things kind of evil over time so it is hard to regulate. so the fda is having a hard time learning how to kind of address this emerging technology. issues such as the adverse reporting when a patient says that a medicine harm to them is that the portable to the pharmaceutical industry looking at this? the patient confidentiality and also issues about how do we deal with misleading information posted by different types of users whether it be a consumer or whether it be potentially another illicit actor. what we are going to be talking about today of course is how the illicit online pharmacies use this format. what led us to this is we were looking at big pharma

pharmaceutical companies to see what their presence was and how they were using it. academics or academia can be behind the curve, so when we report the results not surprisingly we found a lot of the pharmaceutical companies using social media. no big surprise to anyone but we just reported this last year. what we found that was very interesting is that we also found illicit links to no prescription online pharmacies while we were doing our searches and what we found was a high prevalence about 90% of the top marketed drugs in the u.s. had illicit online pharmacy links associated with them. so, it's best to just show pictures to give you an idea how this happened. this is a facebook site and its a canadian pharmacy with the department of health and human services logo displayed. they are advertising the prescription drugs online. this is a twitter post that offers without a prescription and this is another online pharmacy with social media links

embedded within it so you can find the site, etc.. we've also done some additional searches looking at the sort of methodology of the web as far as how it is concerned and how much and what medicines are available online. we found the fda shortage drugs on a line as well as public health risk in that if they are in a shortage they shouldn't be available online and at the low prices that we saw. in addition we found that vaccines are online and that's a clear public health issue because a lot of these products have to be shipped in storage and if you are getting the vaccine in the mail, you are probably self injecting it without a commission supervision so that this kind of dangerous. we've also seen contraceptive devices. i will plug in the info graph which is behind this one over here. unfortunately you have youtube videos showing people how to insert contraceptive devices, which is also very dangerous. and also screening tests are

available online. there are citations in case you ever need sleep and are traveling to different time zone that will get you to sleep pretty quick that you can read the abstract. what we really wanted to explore is this idea once marketing its on the internet is no longer limited to the geographical boundaries. it blows goes globally. we wanted to export that was the case and how accessible and how easy it was to access this form of marketing in the media. so the best way to do that is to basically join the party. and that is what we did. we design the study where we identified the t.a.r.p. to the top pharmaceutical social media types facebook, tauter, google plus, myspace and then we posted our own ad and linked it to a social media site and then we tracked the analytics for what the traffic was and where the visitors were coming. on will show you the ad. we wanted to remain relatively

competitive so we tried to make it look kind of good but it's not the best out there. it is no prescription and safe drug which is kind of an oxymoron. but anyway, we tried to message like other advertisements we saw. we used a fake sealed. there's lots out there. you can make anything you want we advertise to the lowest price because that is what we thought would be compelling. a stock image as a medical professional so we were worried about the mca. we wanted to get an image we could use commercially so we did that on the abandoned and the only thing that we did this kind of amateur is a ticket picture of some medicine and might medicine cabinet and i photoshop did then. what we did is created the ad and then posted it on a social media site. so this is a facebook site and as of last might still available and we stopped the data collection and i will provide you the url if you want to friend this and then we have a link that purported to sell prescription drugs with no prescription. so the major findings of the

study were that three out of the four illicit social media sites we created are still up and i will provide you the url if you ever want to visit them and that within itself is the result because they were never taken down. traffic we generated about 78 to 97 unique users may not repeat users per month for the different sites. accessibility, our sites were very descriptive, so the previous one it's no prescription online pharmacy. so that's the type of terms we used to describe the site. it was low cost as well. it's a great organization that they do not do any funding or ro1 so we are about $20 per site. but river tag is norax and the facebook is no prescription online pharmacy. there are some descriptive is on the traffic mode but one of the more major findings we found was this form of marketing really

did go global. we found first of all but the predominant number of traffic was from the u.s., which kind of matches where a lot of the consumption is happening in the largest prescription drug market so they were at 54%. emerging markets such as china and russia came in second and fourth respectively, and in total we generated user traffic from 18 diverse different countries that occurs among the ten months so it's not exactly the same. the most important things that we see here is we did see a mix of the high income, middle income, and of course sergey markets. they are aware of the scientific where you kind of fess up about what the limitations of your study are. i think they are pretty interesting and informative for this study. first, we did have one site taken down.

and we don't know why it was taken down. we've heard from anecdotal evidence of a lot of the sites are taken down for various reasons. but it was taken down because the site was called a no prescription online pharmacy site we can use for the future enforcement and future surveillance of these types of sites. we have different types of user types on the web that include human users and web bots so it's possible some of the traffic is actually these forms of technology that index the sites but that is still important because it indicates that the site is being actively searched and potentially is going to be on a search engine. and we had relatively low traffic. we were trying to go for about a thousand hits per site plan to mention one of the reasons we have a traffic or we think we have the traffic is we didn't have a working site so we didn't actually selling products so we didn't have any repeat business. that's one thing. and we also didn't do any search engine optimization, search

engine marketing to read some of the stuff you do to market a side as you probably all know is a competitive environment. you have to put in some money to get some money. we were among the other competitors as well as you can see from the top. there is another facebook site that uses a bit more aggressive marketing i would say. and we were not prepared to do that at this point. the bottom picture shows a baby when it comes to misleading marketing i draw the line with babies. i have a nine month old, so i wouldn't do that. we had competition, and that's why we think we have low traffic and there are other sites available. so, some lessons we can learn. primary findings from the study are coming in its preliminary study so we would like to follow it with additional more analytical studies this is more of a descriptive study is that it's possible with little experience, academics not necessarily we are not computer scientists, so it was possible with very little experience to post it on a social media site still available again, and this

form of the media really did go to global patients worldwide. some lessons we can learn from this particular study are that of course there should be some levels of accountability for the service providers. facebook just went through their ipo. if you're a shareholder you are probably not happy with them, but arguably they have some cash on hand and perhaps they should be looking at this from the public health and safety issue. ..

>> if you would like more information about publications, you can contact myself and professor marvin shepherd. i don't know if we have enough time for questions, but i would be happy to take them. i would like to thank the partnership with their support of the fellowship. also, professor, thank you for your leadership in our particular research. [applause] >> okay, i have a softball question here. hopefully. [laughter] >> this is not my dissertation, thank goodness. >> just pretend that it is. >> one of the things that you mentioned about the social media, we have four or five

different social medias. we are seeing a shift towards the social media. are they combined with other efforts? the second question is that i noticed that china was number two on the list. the question is, cannot ranking be relied upon since theoretically we really can't track what china is doing? my question is how valid is that? those are my two questions. >> okay. the first one i remember, the second one i remember as well. but the first question, being is this a movement away from searching? i just don't think internet pharmacies are that static. i think they are very dynamic actors. they are business people and there is a lot of money to be made. they are going to attack e-commerce from all of the

angles that they can. that includes indexing their sites, hopefully a robust marketing campaign, which we do not do, and that will include social media, because it is an emerging form of use. the problem that i have is particularly is that we have an over saturation of youth and adolescence in the social media space. that means there is potential exposure of illicit marketing that is willing our control. that could indicate or relate to nonprescription use of medications, which is a public-health crisis in the united states. that is the problem that i have. i really think they are dynamic in their marketing. social media is a very important aspect of that. it is relatively cheap. it is cheaper than some options right now. because social media relies upon friends and links and stuff like that, we tend to take the information more at face value.

this is an emerging form and i don't think they are limited to that space. on the second question on china, preliminary results, there are some limitations for the data, from the standpoint of how the data came out, russia and china are known to be counterfeit sources. the u.s. is the largest, you know, consumer, prescription drugs are online, theyare over penetrated and the u.s. has the most counterfeiting incidents there as well. i think the data -- we want to do a deep dive on it, but there are certain limitations to it. >> i am thomas welch, i was the senior international policy analyst. >> thank you for coming. >> thank you.

>> i would like to know whether you consulted with a lawyer whether you are violating the state, federal, or international laws? >> sheer. >> if not, how long you would measure before you were apprehended? >> wow, i wish i would've talked to my wife about that before i would've came here and presented. [laughter] >> is this about having a phd or m.d. -- i think they will go to jail before i will. but in any academic community, we consult with the ethics for us and we did get clearance for this particular intervention with them. one of the things we have to do, and it is interesting to some people, not all, we did that, we really wanted to do a messaging

thing where it said that internet pharmacy things are kind of dangerous. but that would be considered a health intervention and we would have to go to irp approval for that. i don't think there is an issue with us tracking the data. we are not actually representing or providing any product. obviously, if we were selling stock or representing and actually had a working site, i think that that would be -- we would have to figure out things. i am too young to go to jail. [laughter] that may not answer your question directly, but i hope that that does help. >> are we out of time? >> hello, mike miller. very interesting presentation and research.

the fda, the pharmaceutical industry and the impact of the internet, it was very interesting to talk about the perceived potential future, which obviously has been very interesting and different. my question is about an international world where if there is more crackdown on the fraudulent medicines, how do you think at all about that -- the criminals in that market might of all, considering so much of the developing world does their communications via cell phone and text message in that kind of thing? i get occasional scam text messages much less frequently than i do e-mails. i am wondering if that is going to be a venue that needs to be looked at. sort of online, have you thought

about that or dreamed about that? >> i don't dream about it, i try to dream about things that are not related to study. but that is an excellent question. you really hit on the next generation on what the research is going to look like. i am in global health, so i look more from a global perspective. of course, in developing markets, it is more the community and pharmacy level where you are seeing the brick and mortar and not the virtual world. the mobile use, the uptake of mobile use is amazing. a lot of the phones are still limited in their ability to show graphics and etc. i think eventually, those types of markets will evolve very quickly and very rapidly, compared to the progress that we have made in the developing countries to these cell phones that are more robust. that is what's going to happen in the online pharmacies that they can. they will move toward that space as well. they will move towards mobile.

you know, we talk about social media being web 2.0. but web 3.0 is already here. it is because of the difficulty to determine a fake site versus a real site at least in the developing countries, you are already seeing that shift and we haven't looked at it robustly. google was an open-source platform for it arguably there is more space in that platform than apple ils. i think we are a little bit behind and we will be with us brick-and-mortar type of situation. but that could quickly change with the adoption of technology. very good question. thank you. thank you very much. [applause] >> here's a look at our lineup tonight on c-span network. you're on c-span2 at 8:00 p.m., republican national committee chair reince priebus takes part of the awards gala.

you can see that tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. on c-span, president obama talks about the september jobs report released today, saying that the encouraging numbers show that the country has made too much progress to turn back to the policies that he said led the nation into an economic crisis. the campaign stop he made today in virginia. even the speech will be aired tonight. also, mitt romney and his remarks, he said that a drop in the nation's unemployment rate, the 7.8%, is not what a real recovery looks like. you can see those remarks at 8:30 p.m. syrian opposition activist predicted that the saudi regime will fall by next summer.

they presented the outlines of a transition plan for syria, which they say is already being used by the opposition and the area no longer under assad's control. >> good morning, ladies and gentlemen. i am jim marshall. i am pleased that everyone is here today for a very important project. it has been sponsored by the institute of peace. my job is to introduce steve heideman. he is our senior advisor for middle east initials. he is extensively published and has taught at columbia and at the civil society at georgetown

university. this project is one that is driven by syrians. with assistance and other kinds of assistance from sister institutions in germany. it is important these kinds of efforts be driven by local populations. things that are handed down from the united states typically don't work all that well. we are very pleased with all of you here. i hope you have lots of questions. steve, if i could turn this over to you. >> thank you very much for opening up this morning. let me add my welcome. we are delighted to see you all here this morning. it is going to be a very interesting conversation about syria and the challenges of managing a post assad transistor. as jim mentioned, this event is

the culmination of a product that has been in gestation for about nine months. it is simply a coincidence if it is in relation to other forms of gestation. this is an opportunity for us to discuss a document the day after, which we have available for you to pick up and arabic and english on a cd, and it provides strategies of how syrians can cope with the broad range of challenges that are inevitably going to follow the transition to a post- assad era. this is very much the product of

deliberations and debate among a group of 45 to 50 significant figures within the syrian opposition who came together, every month for a period of six months to work through the idea -- the ideas that were presented in this document. what i would like to stress, however, in getting its just started this morning, our conception of what we were doing was thinking about issues and challenges that would arise at a moment some distance in the future. we imagine ourselves as thinking about how to poll for problems that were on the distant horizon.

we need to revise how we think and the lives that we impact in syria today. what we are seeing is a process in which transition is not going to happen to the overthrow of the assad regime as a dramatic event that changes the political landscape from one day to the next. what we are seeing is an incremental transition in syria. we are seeing a transition that is unfolding in a fashion. we have exercised authority over their own local affairs, sometimes for periods of many months. as we recognize that in fact, the transition to a post- op ed era is already underway in many parts of syria, the lessons and

strategies and ideas and principles contained in this document no longer become a matter of speculation about the future. they become an opportunity to develop concrete programs and concrete strategies that can make a difference in consolidating the transition that has already begun in those areas of syria that are, today, within the control of the syrian government. and that urges us that we are very anxious to build on in the next phases of our work as we move out beyond what we have done thus far to produce this document and think about how to make it as meaningful as possible who are now beginning who are now beginning futures

for for themselves for the authority of the authoritarian regime. and it is very much in that spirit that we want to talk about the documents this morning. not only to provide you with some background about its origins in the process in which it was produced, not only to talk about some of the ideas that it contains and some of the key recommendations that it makes in the issue that our panelists have focused on, but how we can use the documents as a tool to facilitate the consolidation of transitional areas, beginning right away. what we would like to do right away to get started, we have our speakers in the agenda. i am not going to go through them myself. you can reference them, the

panelists will speak in the order in which they appear in the agenda, i would also like to add that we are being webcast. there is a viewership online with we invite you to submit questions to us through our website. we will also be tweeting about the event and often encourage those who are following the event on twitter to send in questions as well and we will integrate those into our conversations as the morning unfolds. i'm afraid that i also need to mention the standard comment about your cell phones, or other devices. if you would, please, we would appreciate it. together, we would like to introduce the professor who served on the executive

committee of the project to tell you tell us a little bit about the origins and the genesis and the process through which there is a group of syrian development the day after the reports. >> thank you very much, steve. i would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to steve. i would like to say that from the start. as the syrian regime built its case, it was clear that it was a very critical component that was missing. the ability to answer a question that kept coming back to us time

and time again. we were hearing it not just from the inside, but we were hearing it from the outside as well, i mean both in terms of syrians living overseas, maybe living in the united states or elsewhere, very importantly, also, administrations, governments around the world, and obviously from the people, the very people we were kind to convince and trying to convince that this is an important change. the question was always coming back with us. we realized we were facing a critical issue here is that people are changing one individual to another, one authoritarian to another and we are not moving forward. and we would like to change and reform to get people to think

what is the alternative. in order for us to be able to answer that question, we also have to be able to articulate people, that people could articulate those, both inside, outside, to the administrations what is it going to be and what is it going to look like. this is where a group of syrian opposition members, having a series of conversations on how to begin to develop this idea of what is the alternative. also, steve also stepped in and we started to work with them in terms of developing this idea.

the concepts of how we will develop and by january 2012, the first of our series of meetings takes place in berlin. we were able to gather almost 50 syrian opposition members, activists from inside, from syria, some are very prominent, well-known, some belong to organizations and the national council and other entities -- we want to help people with great assistance in certain areas of

expertise. over the coming months, the sears would meet regularly. the syrians would meet regularly. the syrians would meet regularly. in some cases, twice a month. the experts were divided amongst these categories that would work within that group to develop a vision for an answer to the question to what the alternative will be. what was important for us is for

us to get many of the ideas and visions that people have and articulate them in a form that could then be used by a future transitional government or entity that would emerge from the opposition so that when the regime forms, they would have the information and tools and support that they would need in order to see this transition through. it is important for me to also say that this is not -- we are not the only people who have helped set up something like this. there are other people who have also done, you know, more focused or similar types of work, and this is all supposed to be the day after.

it was supposed to be at the disposal of the opposition. there is a misconception that transition begins when the regime falls. well, transition begins now. there are key fundamentals, key fundamental concepts that people have to become familiar with at

least when the transition happens, we are prepared to hit the ground running. many have been liberated from the assad regime, the government control, and already, people they are are actually living and practicing this transition. and our work in the work of others is now being applied and we can begin to see the results and we can evolve our efforts. this is an evolving document. this is a growing document and we intend it always to be as such. we are now actively participating in the use of the document.

>> before you jump in, i want to mention something very important. which is the work to begin creating a kind of change of the mindset of the orientation -- we need to work with the changes that are most urgent and most essential. it turns out that was the first one of many similar massacres. the escalation of violence, it has had an extraordinary corrosive effect on the mindset of syrians participating in this

revolution it has a deep sectarian intercommunal hatred, it has deepened the desire for revenge on the part of those, it has created additional constraints for those who are wavering on what would happen to them if they were to decide that the opposition and the transitional justice framework, the field, offered the strategies and institutions to provide alternatives to the syrian people on the ground today. the legitimate demand for justice and perpetrators being held to account. in ways that do not fall back on

cycles of revenge. the way we are working is when we one that we feel will drive this most urgently to become engaged in work on the ground in syria. >> spivak for many people, for many people in the context of the arab spring. we tend to become aware of our situation. they have been under brutal dictatorship for the last several decades.

syria is a deeply traumatized society. we have had massacres and we have also turned this into an armed conflict causing the deaths of over 30,000 in one town called hamas, if some of you are familiar with that. in the next following 10 years, which would actually inform you why the syrians are willing to sacrifice, in the following 10 years, the syrian regime collectively put punished the society. about 80,000 disappeared. in fact, it is almost an impossibility to meet a syrian that has not been directly or

indirectly impacted by the regime. he took his family years. we have common sense here on this panel. and we have those who know that syria, for a long time, did not experience the rule of law and accountability. there is no mention of human rights, even though cereal was one of them at that time and it

never, never followed them up. incredible levels of torture to constantly scare the syrians. what you have is a very messy situation in the last year and a half, that was intensified, systematically, inconsistently, and what was underground, the suffering underground came to the surface, this would explain the willingness and the resilience of the syrian people not to go back because they know they cannot be in this revolution. that is why transitional justice is at the core of this period.

we have been isolated for a very long time. it has forced people to leave voluntarily or sometimes involuntarily. what we want to do in this project is to provide the framework where syrians are empowered to take the state back into their hands. and to create a coherent of human rights it is not always capable of asking about them. we wanted to create the framework that focuses on healing and reconciliation and creating accountability. i don't want to get too much into detail, we try to focus on

allowing that conversation to begin by encouraging to commit and use the paralegal structure that are a lot of customary laws in different regions in syria that include arbitration. that will help the legal process as well. to allow that transition and to create that accountability. about vacuuming in transition, so that there are two commissions that would allow the syrians to be able to help them.

we were able to share experience and suffering and there was a great deal of healing. we tried to create a framework in which there would be a variety of approaches to transitional justice and not one specific framework. we also wanted to make the syrians aware that traditional justice is not just a legal process, but it is something cultural as well. and it is something illogical that we can always participate in and we want to give them the recommendations of allow them to be empowered as citizens and participate in the process. i will stop here and give the microphone and my colleague. but we will of course, have continued conversations later. >> thank you, very much.

that was a turkic introduction to that piece of the project. security sector reform working group of our project, and it is a second issue that has absolutely critical implications, both to the fate of the syrian revolution and its future. it includes questions like what do we do about the massive internal security apparatus that the syrian regime has created. what happens to it in the event that a more comprehensive transition process happens. it also includes questions about how do we ensure the provision of database security during a transitional period. and that includes questions like how do we avoid the kind of outcome that we have seen in a case like libya, where the fall of the old regime left in its

wake dozens of armed militia groups whose activities we have seen recently culminated in the kind of environment like the murder of christopher stevens in benghazi. how do we begin thinking now about strategy and processes for the provision and security in the reform of institutions and for the transformation of a broader culture in syria that has elevated security and the security apparatus to position that supersedes the democratic rule of law, formal institutions and subordinate them to the preferences of those who run the security apparatus. how do we get syria out of that kind of a context and into one in which the security sector functions consistent with the rule of law. these were the challenges that

we have to deal with in the future. >> thank you very much, steve. good morning, ladies and gentlemen. not only is this a work in progress as more areas are being liberated and documented, we have a list of suggestion and so we laid out some principles in

the reform. the most important of which, i think, is the civilian authority over the army. an army that would be of security services to be able to help themselves politically and economically and socially. , the two editorial integrity of syria. this sector of the armed forces, the intelligence services. we have the many challenges ahead and there are a number of challenges, we have taken some examples and lessons learned from iraq and libya, there would be some measure of chaos as we

have the corrupt federal regime. this may include disturbance and looting and certainly it will include an instrument of regime power to try to destabilize the situation that is already highly unstable. folks, we have together all of the potential challenges that we face ahead as we tried to see the possible solutions for each. there are many regional councils that have endorsed the principle of civilian authority over the military. the national police in syria have, for the most part, let

themselves out from this crisis, so there are many elements that we will be identifying and many elements within the regular forces. many that we can rely on after the collapse of the regime to put on security forces. certainly, those that could be totally revamped, services as they are the ones who must help i'm happy to take your questions. >> in addition to the concerns up front and those we have discussed, perhaps the other most significant dimension,

which our project engages, concerns economic and social reconstruction. the revolution has produced extraordinary destruction across the area. the images following the bombings yesterday were horrific. unfortunately, they were far from unusual. that level of destruction is present from one end of syria to the other. and it will take a herculean effort, including extraordinary parts on the international community, that is quite weary on the demand of states requiring assistance. if reconstruction is to proceed effectively. there is, in addition, an extraordinarily tragic humanitarian dimension as follows and resolution in syria.

there will be 700,000 refugees in syria by the end of the year. these are extraordinary numbers, and again, the efforts involved in addressing the needs and concerns of economic reconstruction will be hugely influential in shaping the fate of the transition and the efforts that have begun under way. but even as the international community and syrians themselves wrestle with those issues, there is the added concern that the institutions of economic governments are developed in syria throughout our corrupt, nepotistic, inefficient. that, too, has to be addressed in the process of economic reconstruction.

we have another arena where the scale of the challenges and the imperative of trying to respond is very critical. with that, i will turn things over to the individual who worked on our economic and social construction. >> thank you, steve, thank you everyone. good morning. as we have all indicated, we have so many challenges that we almost didn't know where to start. we are looking at the immediate needs of the internally displaced. we are looking at a refugee crisis outside of syria. we are looking at the absolute devastation across the entire country. so how could we prioritize. all of these challenges have to

be handled concurrently. we have established a series of objectives through which we could address our economic and social issues and that we have talked about like rule of law in supporting the security sector. our first objective was to consolidate peace. we also have seen additional bloodshed to revenge through revenge killing. another objective was to look at the humanitarian needs in terms of medical care. social support for those who have been traumatized. not only through the revolution, but through the decades of authoritarian rule. we look at restoring basic services.

as a means to help develop civil society. we work to help the maximum number of people. we want to empower local communities and we see that happening in many of the liberated areas. we believe that one of the keys to empowering local communities is through the creation of jobs. and we see an excellent example today where the local community has repaired its industrial bakery, it is producing bread for almost 80% of the population, there is a police force complete with a new uniform and it is becoming a

self sustainable community. this is a major priority for us. we also discussed macroeconomic stability by fostering it at the local level, in line with empowering the local community. and we did talk in our committee about the process of dismantling the legacy of the regime, not in immediate terms, but to slowly, transform society away from the corruption and nepotism. what we have today is the situation where even the slightest transaction requires attention. where business people now routinely that they cannot effect without a kickback from the government. this is another major priority for us. we will continually update the document.

>> thank you. we spent a great deal of time and are colleagues spent time debating it, as i would like to mention, some of the conversations were quite heated. the question is what happens to it from here. i have mentioned and i think i speak for the group as a whole, this is not a document which targets some future transitional process. what is a document that can inform how we can engage in the syrian opposition today. but how does that happen? what kind of steps can we take to ensure that this doesn't just collect dust on the shelves. one thing we are pleased about is that the documents have become something of a reference point for global debate and

discussion about the prosecution of the syrian people and has been endorsed by the syrian national council, it has been widely circulated among local government. there is broad, global awareness of the report, and support for it the content. that, in and of itself, is not enough to ensure that the work that has gone into it will begin making a difference on the ground. and that is the challenge that we are now turning our attention to. and i would like the real privilege of working quite closely over the past nine months as a coordinator for it the team, to talk about

precisely what is happening and what we intend to do with it to make sure that it does begin to make a difference on the job. >> thank you so much, stephen. >> i remember i spent 16 months when i met you in beirut. i have spoken to you about my revolutionary situation and [inaudible] the real work is what is going on here. we started this debate about the day of, we started to assess the

work of this issue. it is not unique, something far away from right now. it was part of the original uprising. we were young. back then we were five months old. we do not have the capacity to undertake such a project. we don't have the entity that can handle such a project. [inaudible] we need to do this. this is what we are expecting from an established democracy

and the support to do this. we started working on this. i would like to talk about the document. how do we present to the syrian people. we are not trying to tell the syrian government what to do or what not to do. this is an effort of more than 50 syrian members of the opposition. some of them experts, we support those by international efforts that we have discussed and we came up with this implementation. how to take it from this point to that point.

how to make sure that things are achieved. would we want to do in this document. we are saying how we are going to do it. that is what we have been competing with. we are very confident of the method that we need for this document. and the results that we have come up with. we do our best to implement this in so many different levels. the executive committee, also,

we will help the transition and i have been to turkey and we are looking for the ability to establish this in a place where we can be in cooperation with the activists. we have reached this for our document. they need to support our effort

for the implementation. we are talking about the support [inaudible] many different levels and we are working for the transitional justice. also, we have to reach out we have to continue working in the implementation in this sector.

you have invested a tremendous effort in this project. thank you for our german partners this is exactly what we expect from you to help us. and we are very painful. >> thank you very much. we have some very good material to work with. this group has made that clear. you mentioned the importance of communicating ideas about the project to the syrian people themselves. and that is something that we are attentive to the minister of

foreign affairs or perhaps you would like to show this group and tell them about one of the frameworks we have developed in order to communicate the project. >> thank you. we are working with the union of free syrian students who have a network of approximately 80 groups throughout the country. in addition to that, we have developed a communications campaign that will be rolling out in the coming days. we are going to different communities, different generations, different sectors of the economy to reinforce the recommendations out of each of the areas. we are going to impress upon him

not to engage in revenge killing or seek out revenge. we are going to the business community to reveal to them to be conscious of the need to jumpstart the local community and empower different sectors. we are looking at this and we will be releasing videos in all kinds of different materials to keep that message going. outside syria, but especially inside. >> thank you very much. we would like to open things up and begin the conversation with you. there are microphones on either side of the auditorium, and we would ask you to mine up behind the microphone in order to oscar presenters here. i would like to say the

institute as well, needs to think a number of individuals and institutions who helped make this effort possible. not only the syrian oppositions or considers the participants of the effort, the ministry of foreign affairs, the dutch ngo, the norwegian ngo, norad from all of these organizations providing support that help make this effort possible. doing this work in a setting that could be perceived by all syrians as a safe space within which they could talk in confidence and build trust among one another. those meetings were facilitated by a german partner, e